Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

-----but that does not mean that there must be a financial interaction at the point of use. That is commodifying in a way. It is making water a private commodity rather than a socially owned resource that everyone is entitled to use and for which people contribute through the tax system. I am throwing that in as another dimension to this argument. There are different ways of becoming cashless. It does not have to mean digitising, privatising and commodifying things. There are areas where we can take things out of the cash economy by making them free at the point of use and paid for in a different way that is easier for people in contributing to the tax system on the basis of their income.

The other concept that is relevant to this debate is that of alienation. This is an increasing feature of our society. At the heart of many mental health issues is the fact that, increasingly, young people and all other members of society are being affected by alienation. There is no doubt that there is a growing mental health crisis that comes from many pressures on people. One feature of that crisis is alienation. Things that used to be human interactions and involved relations between human beings are being replaced by interactions with faceless, anonymous forces in society, whether it is technology, big corporations or large bureaucracies. That is not good. People such as Kafka wrote about this many years ago. There is more and more alienation happening. Fundamentally, alienation is not good for the mental health of human beings or for the cohesion of our society. We need to think carefully about it. There is no doubt that being able to interact with people by means of paying cash, or not being able to do so, is part of the pressure in the context of people being moved in a direction that can be alienating when it comes to human relations. One of the most fundamental needs of human beings is to be able to interact with other human beings. We must be careful about things that will reduce people's right or choice to interact with other human beings in day-to-day economic or social processes. We must ensure that the choice to interact is still there.

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